8 Best Restaurants in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona, From Inventive Thai to Award-Winning Pizza | Condé Nast Traveler

"Valentine is a warm restaurant-cafe-bar-bakery hybrid that presents a bold vision of Arizona food. Co-owner Blaise Faber has dubbed its style New Southwestern. Chef Donald Hawk delivers in spades on the promise of innovative dishes tapping into regional traditions. He takes specific desert ingredients—tepary bean, i’itoi onions, cactus fruits—and creatively deploys them to give his food intrigue and soul. That prickly pear? It goes into gochujang for beef heart ssam. The mighty tepary bean? The fragrant, faintly smoky sidekick to ribeye with huitlacoche butter. Valentine’s coffee program is similarly inspired, and cocktail maestro Faber has devised unique tipples inspired by Arizona’s biomes. Oh, and Crystal Kass’s unique program has won national accolades. Valentine feels about as unique as a seven-armed saguaro." - Lizbeth Scordo, Chris Malloy